Jane is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games—or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. Jane is also a future forecaster. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future. Her research focuses on how games are transforming the way we lead our real lives, and how they can be used to increase our resilience and well-being.
Me: [Intros the project]. We’re gonna be starting with the human and the human body — the most basic needs like food and water to survive, then maybe move outward to love. And then community, and that’s where we can work in the urban question: how we’ll live going forward as communities. That’s also maybe where transportation will come in. Where surveillance might come in. Where connection with your neighbors comes in. So I wanted to talk with you! What do you imagine 2050 will be like? What kinds of things are you thinking about?
Jane: The Institute for the Future is having our 10 year forecast next week and it’s in the Bay Area. It’s in Mountainview. I’d love to extend an invitation to you. That will answer a lot of your questions. I’m going to speak on behalf of the institute rather than myself personally. We have a number of different research programs. A big one is future of food. How tech is trying to increase the sustainability of the food supply chain — impact of climate change, lab-created meat, GMOs for different DNA types, biome modified foods to cure diseases and mental health issues, the whole body of work around that. That I’m happy to send you our forecasts. We have a new report we just launched at the climate innovation summit that happened last week — what levers we have to stop climate change? Not forecasting what the world will be like but what are the ways we might stop climate change?
Me: I didn’t bucket out climate change or migration as a specific topic because it’s a layer that will affect everything.
Jane: Displacement is a big research topic that we’re tackling. I think you’re right to lok at it iat a human level. How will we learn? How will we stay connected to our family and our cultures? We have a health program that looks at life extension to personalized medicine and augmentation — exoskeletons and neuro-rewrite technologies. And a big part of our research is around surveillance state, privacy and data issues. And a ton of research on the future of work. Which is the big issue that creates a lot of anxiety.
Me: Automation replacing humans?
Jane: That and one of the things I think about is — the number one job for migrant workers is in slaughterhouses in the United States. It’s traumatizing, it’s high turnover and super stressful and the rise of lab-curated meat is going to change the nature of meat labor in the future. Instead of a low skill job we would have a higher skill job that requires you to be a lab technician to work with sophisticated lab equipment. And it’s not automation! It’s a new skill set. It’s a different type of worker. On one hand it’s good because it’s less traumatizing. It costs too much from a planetary perspective to eat meat. When I think about the future, we try to come up with these sort of intersections where a lot of the dilemmas and innovations hit up against each other. And the anxieties we have hit up against innovations and we try to then ask what will be possible in the future, what should we worry about in the future. The surveillance in China is the best
Me: Oh yeah, Xinjiang province is a test bed for a highly wired police state.
Jane: Yeah. Most of the reporting is anxiety laden but many people in China like the programs of surveillance. They are testing a hundred different versions and they’re learning a lot about what surveillance states where people feel not paranoid or disempowered by but transparent enough. One criteria that’s not apocalyptic is if the number of things you can do to benefit you and increase your score by a magnitute of 100 to 1, so for every one negative thing you can get dinged for there is 100 things you can do to be judged favorably, that might feel like an environment where you have many avenues to improve your bad reputation. Versus a system you can be dinged for 100 different things. That’s toxic, punishing and anxiety-producing. The way I look at it is to really look at multiple futures. The technology trends is definitely headed this way — so we can steer it, not stop it. We are looking at different directions it can go. So we can articulate one possible future we’re not terrified by. Or one that sounds better than the present.
Even if it’s something like climate change, our new report is trying to figure out how this brings out the best in humanity and the types of solutions to create a brighter future instead of punishing people with dystopian possibilities.
I will send you some of our research and invite you to our conference. In terms of specific topics and ideas. We have a ton of researchers who would be happy to talk to you.
Future Human 